Monday, July 30, 2018

Think Tank Watch has read countless think tank papers over 100 pages long and would be happy to do so never again. Should think tank reports be shorter? Here is more from the Wall Street Journal about published economic papers being too long:

A backlash is building against inflation—the kind showing up in economics journals.

The
average length of a published economics paper has more than tripled
over the past four decades, and some academics are sick of wading
through them. At this year’s American Economics Association conference, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor
David Autor
compared a 94-page working paper about the minimum wage to “being bludgeoned to death with a Nerf bat” and started a Twitter hashtag, #ThePaperIsTooDamnedLong.

“It was a very good paper,” Mr. Autor said in a later interview, but it
set him off because it represented the “logorrhea of our current state
of scholarship.”

Let’s get to the point: Economists want economists to talk less. The AEA
announced last year it would launch a journal dedicated to publishing
only concise papers, at least by economists’ standards—nothing longer
than 6,000 words, or about 15 double-spaced pages.

Between 1970 and 2017, the average length of papers published in five
top-ranked economics journals swelled from 16 pages to 50 pages,
according to an analysis by University of California, Berkeley
economists Stefano DellaVigna and
David Card.

Thursday, July 26, 2018

H.R. McMaster, pushed out in April
as President
Donald Trump’s
national security adviser, is joining Stanford University’s
Hoover Institution, where he hopes to develop bipartisan national
security ideas.

Mr. McMaster, who struggled to retain influence
in the fractious White House, said, as a senior fellow, he hopes his
work can influence national security policy as the U.S. works to combat
rising threats from rivals such as Russia and China.

While working at Hoover, Mr. McMaster said he also is planning to write a
book. But those looking for a tell-all tale of West Wing intrigue are
likely to be disappointed. Mr. McMaster said he plans to write a
substantive book about national security.

Mr. McMaster first worked at Hoover in 2002 as a national security
affairs fellow and then served as a visiting fellow from 2003 to 2017.
He will now become the Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow, a post
commemorating the Middle East scholar who was friends with Mr. McMaster.

It was already expected that McMaster would return to think tank land. Here is a Think Tank Watch post about conservatives attacking McMaster for his previous think tank work.

Tuesday, July 24, 2018

Maria Butina, accused in the United States of spying for Russia, had
wider high-level contacts in Washington than previously known, taking
part in 2015 meetings between a visiting Russian official and two senior
U.S. officials.

The meetings, disclosed by several people
familiar with the sessions and a report prepared by a Washington think
tank that arranged them, involved Stanley Fischer, then Federal Reserve
vice chairman, and Nathan Sheets, then Treasury undersecretary for
international affairs.

Butina traveled to the United States in April 2015 with Alexander
Torshin, then the Russian Central Bank deputy governor, and they took
part in separate meetings with Fischer and Sheets to discuss
U.S.-Russian economic relations during Democratic former President
Barack Obama’s administration.

The meetings with Fischer and Sheets were arranged by the Center for
the National Interest, a Washington foreign policy think tank that is
supportive of efforts to improve U.S.-Russia relations. Paul Saunders,
its executive director, in December 2016 urged then President-elect
Donald Trump to ease tensions with Russia. In articles in its magazine,
The National Interest, members of the think tank have also warned of
the costs to the United States of confronting Russia or getting involved
in Eurasian conflicts.

The meetings were documented in a Center
for the National Interest report seen by Reuters that outlined its
Russia-related activities from 2013 to 2015. The report described the
meetings as helping bring together “leading figures from the financial
institutions of the United States and Russia.”

Saunders, the think tank’s executive director, said Torshin spoke at an
April 2015 event about the Russian banking system and Butina attended as
Torshin’s interpreter. Saunders said people at the organization cannot
recall details of Torshin’s presentation.

Here is a previous Think Tank Watch piece about the Center for the National Interest (CNI) hosting Donald Trump.

Here is a ProPublica piece entitled "Why Russian Spies Really Like American Universities."

Cato scholar: "There oughta be a German word for when cable news covers a complex area of policy wonkery but interviews a person who clearly has no knowledge of the subject and just Googled it before the hit."

Dinesh D'Souza, formerly a fellow at AEI and Hoover, pardoned by President Trump.

Friday, July 6, 2018

Here are our favorite excerpts from a New York Times Magazine piece by Jonathan Mahler about how the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation has staffed the Trump Administration:

On staffing the Trump Administration:

The Trump team may not have been prepared to staff the government, but
the Heritage Foundation was. In the summer of 2014, a year before Trump
even declared his candidacy, the right-wing think tank had started
assembling a 3,000-name searchable database of trusted movement
conservatives from around the country who were eager to serve in a
post-Obama government. The initiative was called the Project to Restore
America, a dog-whistle appeal to the so-called silent majority that
foreshadowed Trump’s own campaign slogan.

On Trump and Heritage being an unlikely match:

In some ways, Trump and Heritage were an unlikely match. Trump had no
personal connection to the think tank and had fared poorly on a
“Presidential Platform Review” from its sister lobbying shop, Heritage
Action for America, which essentially concluded that he wasn’t even a
conservative.

On helping each other:

And yet Heritage and Trump were uniquely positioned to help each other.
Much like Trump’s, Heritage’s constituency is equal parts donor class
and populist base. Its $80 million annual budget depends on six-figure
donations from rich Republicans like Rebekah Mercer, whose family
foundation has reportedly given Heritage $500,000 a year since 2013. But
it also relies on a network of 500,000 small donors, Heritage “members”
whom it bombards with millions of pieces of direct mail every year. The
Heritage Foundation is a marketing company, a branding agency — it
sells its own Heritage neckties, embroidered with miniature versions of
its Liberty Bell logo — and a policy shop rolled into one. But above
all, Heritage is a networking group.

On victory for Heritage:

Today it is clear that for all the chaos and churn of the current
administration, Heritage has achieved a huge strategic victory. Those
who worked on the project estimate that hundreds of the people the think
tank put forward landed jobs, in just about every government agency.
Heritage’s recommendations included some of the most prominent members
of Trump’s cabinet: Scott Pruitt, Betsy DeVos (whose in-laws endowed
Heritage’s Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Religion and Civil
Society), Mick Mulvaney, Rick Perry, Jeff Sessions and many more. Dozens
of Heritage employees and alumni also joined the Trump administration —
at last count 66 of them, according to Heritage, with two more still
awaiting Senate confirmation. It is a kind of critical mass that
Heritage had been working toward for nearly a half-century.

In March 2016,the
Republican establishment stepped up its effort to stop Trump. More than
100 Republican national-security experts signed an open letter publicly
committing to fight his election, calling him a “racketeer” and
denouncing his dishonesty and “admiration for foreign dictators.” A
number of the signatories were fellows of conservative think tanks; none
were affiliated with Heritage at the time. Heritage treated Trump as it
would any other candidate, giving his campaign staff more than a dozen
briefings and sending them off with decks of cards bearing Heritage
policy proposals and market-tested “power phrases.”

On what Heritage staffers ate during election night:

On election night, Heritage turned its first floor over to a viewing party with an open bar, chicken wings and red, white and blue cupcakes.

On Heritage staffing the Trump Administration:

Heritage helped place countless others, from staff assistants to cabinet
secretaries. In some cases, DeMint intervened directly, calling Pence
to argue for Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman whose political career
DeMint helped start years earlier in South Carolina. Mulvaney is now the
director of the Office of Management and Budget, and as this article
went to press, he was serving out the remaining time in a stint as the
acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau...

On current Heritage-Trump relations:

The president and his favorite think tank continue to draw closer.
Administration officials speak regularly at Heritage and give frequent
interviews to The Daily Signal. In April, Pruitt and Attorney General
Jeff Sessions were both scheduled to speak at a Heritage donor
conference in Palm Beach, Fla. (Sessions, under fire from the president
because of the Russia investigation, dropped out.)

On the Trump-Heritage revolving door:

Churn is a central feature of this administration, even for its
unofficial staffing agency. Paul Winfree, a Heritage economist who
helped draft Trump’s first budget, is back at the think tank. So are
Stephen Moore, who worked on the Trump tax cuts; David Kreutzer, who
played a key role in dissolving a White House working group that was
studying the monetary costs associated with climate-warming carbon
dioxide; and Hans von Spakovsky, who helped run the now-defunct
voter-fraud commission...

Here is a recent Think Tank Watch piece about big changes that have taken place recently at the Heritage Foundation.

According to a recording of the meeting, she [Anne-Marie Slaughter] said that while she
recognized that the standard in journalism was never to show sources
what you were writing, New America’s “norm can’t be that. We’re an
organization that develops relationships with funders. And you know,
these are not just black boxes; they’re people. Google is a person, the
Ford Foundation—these are people. . . . And particularly when they give
you money, which is really a nice thing . . . basic courtesy I think
requires—if you know something really bad, you say, ‘Here’s a heads-up.’
”

On New America's past and present:

Founded at the height of the Nasdaq boom, New America was meant to be an
antidote to other Washington think tanks—a young, nimble provocateur
that would dispense with convention and birth fresh ideas. Nearly two
decades later, the organization, which now employs more than 250 people,
is casting about for relevance in a hyper-partisan era, according to
interviews with more than three dozen current and former staffers, many
of whom wanted anonymity for fear of retribution in the tight-knit DC
policymaking community. In a way, it’s a symbol of an entire Washington
industry—policymaking—that’s under pressure to fund itself without
making ideological or ethical sacrifices. If the Open Markets episode
became a public-relations debacle, it also alienated a swath of the
organization and exposed how much New America has outgrown its earliest
ambitions.

On a shift in New America funding:

After 2009, however, the think tank began landing US government
contracts, including millions of dollars’ worth of work from the State
Department and the US Agency for International Development to help
develop covert wireless networks for dissidents in Iran, Syria, Libya,
and Cuba. Given that the organization had long prided itself on not
being another Beltway bandit feeding off federal agencies, this shift
disturbed some who worried that it signaled mission drift. “I think government dollars automatically change the character of an institution,” says the Atlantic’s Steve
Clemons, one of New America’s first employees. “I was opposed
completely, entirely, 9,000 percent. It dumbs down institutions, whether
people want to believe it does or not.”

On funding tension at the think tank:

Fix the Debt was an enormous publicity generator for New America and was
among its biggest moneymakers. The majority of its funders, though,
were Republicans, including Wall Street tycoon Pete Peterson. And that
caused liberals in the organization to blanch at its association with
the right. Board member Bernard Schwartz, a major liberal donor who
backed both the economic-growth program and nearly all of the fellows
program, became so uncomfortable that he cut ties with the think tank.
Eventually, Fix the Debt and its parent program parted ways with New
America, too.

On New America's new office:

One of Slaughter’s first orders of business was moving New America from
its modest downtown headquarters to a building a block from the White
House. The space had all the amenities of a DC power player: a
wrap-around roof deck with views of the Mall, trendy teal accents, and
sleek design. The upgrade of 20,000 square feet raised some eyebrows
internally, but Slaughter stressed that the extra space was essential.
“It embodies who we are and where we want to go and inspires us to get
there,” she declared.

On criticizing donors:

Five months into Slaughter’s tenure, a New America policy analyst
published a blog post criticizing a partnership between Comcast and an
online-education website. Despite objections from New America program
directors, according to an e-mail, Slaughter allowed a senior VP at
Comcast to write a defensive and self-congratulatory response in the
think tank’s weekly newsletter. Employees would get another portrait the next year when a New America
fellow named Steve LeVine was reporting an exposé on Sakti3, a battery
company. Its CEO called Slaughter to broach the idea of funding New
America but also voiced concerns about LeVine’s reporting. Afterward,
Slaughter went to LeVine’s editor to relay the CEO’s objections. As word
of the conversation spread, staff felt that a line had been crossed.
Slaughter apologized to LeVine for interfering with the story.

On Slaughter's political alliances:

Slaughter’s political alliances also became news, in silly as well as
serious ways. In 2015, four months after Donald Trump decided to run for
President, Slaughter and a colleague met Ivanka Trump at an event in
DC. After chatting, Trump asked the women for their shoe sizes so she
could send each a pair of boots from her fashion line. They obliged, and
when the boots showed up in the mail, Slaughter and her colleague took
them home. A year later, just before the election, WikiLeaks released e-mails
revealing that Slaughter had been collaborating informally with Hillary
Clinton’s campaign. The e-mail traffic showed Slaughter trying to
persuade New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that the
uproar around Clinton’s private e-mail use was overblown and that
“everyone” Slaughter knew at State also used private e-mail. As it was, stories were circulating that their boss was gunning for a
post in a Clinton White House and grooming their think tank for
Hillary’s presidency. Since Slaughter took over, more than a dozen
former Obama administration appointees have joined the ranks. A couple,
including Cecilia Muñoz, Obama’s top domestic-policy adviser, are among
New America’s VPs.

On New America's annual retreats:

Phil Longman, who worked at New America for 18 years until last summer
when he departed with Lynn, says you could see the organization watering
down its unorthodox brand through its annual retreats. They used to be
“freeform” gatherings attended by staff and board members, “punctuated
by highly competitive rounds of touch football and also a fair amount of
drinking,” he says. “But starting about ten years ago, these fellows
retreats gave way to highly formal, scripted sessions in which fellows,
if they were allowed to talk at all, were asked to put on dog-and-pony
shows for would-be donors. The most original and iconoclastic thinkers
were generally left off the program because, well, their ideas were
‘unfundable.’ Eventually, if you weren’t ‘fundable,’ you were gone.”

On New America's financial woes:

In particular, some worried about the organization’s financial footing. For one thing, New America had beefed up its administrative teams,
adding staff in fundraising and other areas and expanding the
organization’s central bureaucracy, a turnaround from its lean
beginnings. The number of staffers earning more than $100,000 in
reportable compensation jumped from 29 in 2014 to 49 by 2016, according
to tax filings. Slaughter earned $535,000 in 2015, her salary increasing
27 percent a year later to $677,000. (The president of the Center on
Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank with comparable revenues,
took home $242,000 in 2016.) There was also the cost of the upscale new DC headquarters. According
to financial audits, New America reported rent expenses of $1.3 million
in 2014, the last full year it was in its old building, while rent
expenses for the new space amounted to $3.3 million in 2016. Program directors were being asked to hand over more money toward fixed
costs. “The culture has really shifted in major ways over the last five
years, from a place where the center supports the programs to one where
the programs support the center,” says Sascha Meinrath, a former New
America vice president who led its tech-policy program from 2008 to
2014. According to internal budget documents, as the organization laid out its
2017 budget, it was seeing red. Revenues had been jumping, from $14
million in 2008 to $38 million by 2016, according to its public tax
filings. But so had expenses. Going into 2017, New America was privately
forecasting that expenses would badly exceed revenue, leading to a
projected drop of $11 million in net assets. Not helping matters was
that the organization has no endowment.

On a think tank book launch:

Slaughter also pointed to a forthcoming book by one of its then fellows, Franklin Foer. World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech argues that Silicon Valley poses a threat to civil society. The invocation took Foer by surprise. A few months earlier, as he’d
been preparing for the book’s release, he’d sensed the think tank was
backing away from it. First, he says, the organization informed him that
his New York book event would no longer be primarily hosted by New
America and that the viewpoints represented on the panel would need to
be “balanced.” Foer had attended many other New America book events and
knew “balance” was not a typical requirement for what are mainly
celebratory events for fellows. Still, he agreed to the conditions. “But after the fact,” he says, “I learned that the development
officer, Meredith [Hanley], had a meeting where she freaked out about
the prospect of my book causing blowback for New America from Google and
was putting pressure on the fellows program to try to somehow dampen
their association with it.”

On hiring a management consultant:

That month, the think tank’s board hired a management consultant named
Jon Huggett to interview nearly 40 people affiliated with the
organization. He found that most employees he spoke to felt confident
about the organization’s intellectual independence and that Lynn’s
departure wasn’t seen as due to funder pressure. “Barry behaved
rationally, for himself,” said one. In the end, Slaughter retained the
backing of the board—one of its co-chairs at the time suggested in a
letter to staff that Lynn had used New America as a scapegoat to advance
his own interests.

On the future of New America:

Some still feel anxious about the think tank’s finances and future. The
organization has had four CFOs in the past five years, and there was an
abrupt leadership shake-up on the board last November. While New America
has had continued success raising restricted funds for program-specific
initiatives, like most nonprofits it has a harder time raising
unrestricted dollars. In 2016, an internal committee was tasked with
reviewing the organization’s finances, out of recognition, they said,
that winning more program grants does not necessarily leave enough money
to cover the organization’s fixed costs. Their recommendations to the
board included growing more policy programs as well as increasing New
America’s corporate-donor pipeline by 30 to 40 prospects annually. (In
2017, 8 percent of funding came from big business.) While the committee
noted that the organization was staying afloat thus far by increasing
board support and netting big gifts, this was “not a long-term
strategy.”

Here is a previous Think Tank Watch post documenting all the happenings and reaction related to New America's Google incident.

On the same day that
President Trump is in Helsinki to meet with Russian President Vladimir
Putin, legislators from Western nations will be in Washington for a
meeting, sponsored by the Atlantic Council, to discuss the Russian
threat and the challenges posed by social media and disinformation.

The state of play: "Pulling
at the Strings: The Kremlin’s Interference in Elections," will feature
Sens. Mark Warner and Marco Rubio, with members of parliament from the
U.K., Canada, Eastern Europe and elsewhere.

Warner,
who approached the Atlantic Council with the idea, wants to send a
message to Russia (and also to social media companies) that the West is
unified in standing against the threat posed by Russian disinformation
and interference.

The conference will begin
with a private roundtable for members of Congress and members of
parliament; followed by a press conference with Warner, Rubio, and
members of parliament; then a fireside chat with the senators; and will
conclude with a public panel discussion.

The Trump-Putin summit is scheduled for July 16 in Helsinki, Finland.

Among other things, Atlantic Council is working with Facebook to fight election disinformation.

About Me

Think Tank Watch is a one-stop-shop for learning and thinking about think tanks. It covers domestic and global think tank news, gossip, personnel, reports, studies, and pretty much anything else related to think tanks. Think Tank Watch can be found cruising the mean streets of "Think Tank Row" and beyond, attending scores of think tank events each year. Since its founding in 2012, Think Tank Watch has become the #1 source of think tank news and gossip in the world. Questions, comments, and tips can be sent to:
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